Beyond Dark Flow: public programs
Talk with Catherine L. Hansen:Interactive Fiction and the Arts of Attention
(6/14/26)
At this evening talk with educator and researcher Catherine L. Hansen, we phone Tokyo to discuss what video games and other game media can show us, as laboratories of radical, minor, non-commodified attention. Interactive fiction (IF) lies at the intersection of experimental and avant-garde lineages in art and literature, from Dada and Surrealism to pataphysics and the Oulipo—a mid-century US hobbyist counterculture of coders, cavers, and D&D role-players—and a contemporary community of noncommercial makers and storytellers.
How are avant-garde dreams of revolutionizing everyday life through renewed attention still alive in today’s gaming cultures, from mainstream to marginal? How have they been sustained or challenged by new technologies? How can text democratize the attentional architecture of gaming? Finally, how can we look at games (including IF) as a place where practices of attention become negotiable, communal, newly legible, and unpredictably creative? How can this help us see familiar games differently, and also imagine what games could still be?
In light of these questions, we will talk about and play X is for Examine, a collection of IF games made by Hansen and her University of Tokyo students Lee Carlisle, Chenren Li, and Edwin Zheng, now on view at SoRA’s current exhibition,Beyond Dark Flow.
Led by Catherine L. Hansen, who teaches literature, writing, and game studies at the Center for Global Education, University of Tokyo. She is coeditor/author of In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001-2021 and author of Powers of No: The Infra Noir Surrealist Group (November 2026).
GAMES AND PLAY SALON with boshi's place (6/20/26)
Join us for a gathering of performances, talks, and presentations by the members of boshi’s place, with Everest Pipkin.
What new artistic possibilities can we nurture where games and video games become sites of attention? On Saturday June 20 at 5:30pm, we bring together members of boshi's place and Everest Pipkin, Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, for experimental performances, talks, and presentations questioning what games can become when rules and boundaries between disciplines are ruptured.
In open projector-style, each presenter is given five to fifteen minutes to propose, perform, and reconceptualize play and interactivity as modes of artistic expression. Highlights include a reading of Antigone through the lens of Super Mario 64, the theory of dead and alive time in gameworlds, and a retrospective of GeoGuessr in New York City, amongst many others.
Photos 1-2 by Daniel Vaughan and 3 by Ali Lim
Play Out of the Box: A Game-Making Workshop with Aging in Play (6/28/26)
Join design collective Aging in Play (AIP) to create your own games from everyday materials.
What kinds of games can be played using a cup, a ping pong ball, and a piece of cardboard? A game of movement, memory, chance, or something no one played before? Join design collective Aging in Play (AIP) to create your own games from everyday materials.
AIP co-designs games with older adults in pursuit of an empowering and accessible model of play through the “AIP Playbox,” their portable kit that contains modular elements and prompts for creating and playing games anywhere. While the project has focused on older adults so far, the workshop will also explore how an adaptable and player-led approach can bring people together across other shared cultures and communities.
For this hands-on workshop, come ready to try games that AIP and older adults have co-created so far, design your own games, and help build the AIP game library, as your game ideas may be adapted and tested in future AIP play sessions with older adult communities.
Led by Hao Jie Sim, Xiaolan Fu, Kelsey Zhang, Aging in Play (AIP) explores play as a shared community practice for older adults to support health, connection, and agency. Through accessible games, facilitation tools, and co-creation, AIP invites participants to move, create, adapt rules, and shape moments of joy together. The project challenges stereotypes of aging and frames later life as a space for participation, creativity, and community belonging.
Photos by Daniel Vaughan
